Contemporary politics, local and international current affairs, science and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
Truth never damages a cause that is just ~ MAHATMA GANDHI

Wednesday, 7 June 2017

Climate change is real. So why won’t the right admit it? Marcus Nield

From hard Brexiters to Donald Trump, nationalists who deny the existence
of manmade global warming will eventually have to face the facts

‘Nationalists, gripped by an isolationist logic, are unable or unwilling
to face the reality of global warming’. A protest against Donald
Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement in
Chicago. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Wednesday 7 June 2017 00.13 AEST

Around 97% of climate scientists confirm the existence of manmade global warming, and public opinion is steadily catching up. In the UK, a recent poll
suggested 84% of British people want Theresa May to “convince Trump not
to quit” the Paris climate agreement. According to a survey spanning 40
nations, 78% of people support their country joining the global agreement.

Consensus on manmade global warming has never been stronger. Yet
climate denial remains strong among a particular ideological group. Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement
last week provides the strongest evidence yet that nationalists,
gripped by an isolationist logic, are unable or unwilling to face the
reality of global warming.
Yet American nationalists are not the only ones to resist action on climate change. Ukip’s general election manifesto pledges to pull the UK out of the Paris accord. More concerning, however, is that Eurosceptic Conservatives include prominent climate sceptics such as Lord Lawson.
Theresa May closed the Department for Energy and Climate Change within 24 hours of becoming prime minister. Having received £390,000 in donations
from senior oil executives since she came to power, her manifesto now
pledges to “build on the unprecedented support already provided to the
oil and gas sector”. An entire Conservative election campaign is
premised on the brand of “strong and stable”, while May keeps quiet
about climate change – described by the UN as a threat to global
stability “unprecedented in scale”.
Climate denial extends from the Brexit ringleaders to the voters who support them. A ComRes poll
found that leave voters are twice as likely to deny manmade climate
change as those who voted remain. The same poll found that Brexiters
exhibit a general “distrust towards scientists”. In other words, they’ve
had enough of experts.

Across the world, nationalist programmes – the French Front National,
the BNP, Donald Trump, the Danish People’s party – have tried to
cripple credibility in climate science, which requires collective action
between states and is thus, for them, what Al Gore and others have
called an inconvenient truth.
But there’s another explanation for climate denial among leave
voters. Climate sceptics and hard-Brexiters share the common denominator
of right-leaning free-market ideology. Over the past decade, various
studies have found that conservatives and economic liberals are considerably more likely than other people to reject anthropogenic global warming, presumably because this is a problem that the market cannot solve.

Eco-nationalism, woven with contradiction, turns environmental discourse into a geopolitical blame game

The true danger from nationalist framings of climate change, however,
is not denial, but the weaponisation of the environment in the service
of self-interest. Trump famously called global warming a Chinese “hoax”,
but less well known is that climate denial in China also arises from a
nationalist distrust, in this case towards the west. A study published in the journal Environmental Sociology
found that climate scepticism resulted from a patriotic “conspiracy
theory that sees climate change as a western plot to constrain China’s
development”. Similarly in India, the nationalism of the prime minister,
Narendra Modi, is tied to the continuation of dirty coal as well as the
excuse that western countries aren’t pulling their weight.
But Marine Le Pen is perhaps the politician to have taken
environmental nationalism the furthest. In 2014, the Front National
leader launched what she called the New Ecology movement, promising to ban wind farms and reduce France’s dependence on oil, but condemning the environmental movement as a “communist project”.
This eco-nationalism, woven with contradiction, turns environmental
discourse into a geopolitical blame game. Eventually, Brexiters must
come to realise this dissonance, along with the unalterable reality that
air – and the carbon dioxide in it – does not respect national borders.

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About Me

I was inspired to start this when I discovered old editions of "The Worker". "The Worker" was first published in March 1890, it was the Journal of the Associated Workers of Queensland. It was a Political Newspaper for the Labour Movement. The first Editor was William "Billy" Lane who strongly supported the iconic Shearers' Strike in 1891. He planted the seed of New Unionism in Queensland with the motto “that men should organise for the good they can do and not the benefits they hope to obtain,” he also started a Socialist colony in Paraguay.
Because of the right-wing bias in some sections of the Australian media, I feel compelled to counter their negative and one-sided version of events.
The disgraceful conduct of the Murdoch owned Newspapers in the 2013 Federal Election towards the Labor Party shows how unrepresentative some of the Australian media has become.